All things DevOps

These days the pace of innovation in DevOps can leave you feeling like you’re jogging on a treadmill programmed to run faster than Usain Bolt. Mastery requires hours of practice and the last decade in DevOps has not allowed for it. Before gaining 10 years of experience running virtual machines using VmWare in private data-centers, private cloud software like Openstack and Cloudstack came along, and just when you and your team painfully achieved a stable install you were told running virtual machines in public clouds like AWS, GCP, and Azure is the way forward. By the time you got there it was time to switch to containers, and before you can fully appreciate those, server-less functions are on the horizon, but I digress. If you want to know more about server-less functions, see my previous article on AWS Lambda. Instead, this article will focus on running Docker containers inside of a Kubernetes cluster on Google’s Cloud Platform.

Linux Containers, which were recently popularized by Docker need something to help manage them and while there are many choices, Kubernetes the open-sourced container management system from Google is the undisputed king at this time. Given that Kubernetes was started by Google, it should be expected that the easiest way to install it is using Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP). However, Openshift from Redhat also provides a nice batteries included abstraction if you need to get up and running quickly as well as kops.

Pre-Requisites

In addition, you need some form of a computer with Internet connectivity, some typing skills, a brain that can read, and a determination to finish…For now I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you have all of these. It is also nice to have your beverage of choice while you do this, a fine tea, ice cold beer, or glass of wine will work, but for Cancer’s sake please skip the sugar.

Here is where I would normally insert a link to facts on sugar and Cancer’s link, but I literally just learned I would be spreading rumors… Fine drink your Kool-Aid, but don’t blame me for your calories.

The Build Out of our Self Healing IRC Server Hosting Containers

I lied dude, IRC is so 1995 and unfortunately, ICQ’s been dead and Slack won’t let me host their sexy chat application with game like spirit and better jokes than Kevin Heart. So…sorry to excite you… but I guess I will fallback to the docs here and install Nginx like us newb’s are supposed to.

After you are done following these inspirational leaders in the community go to youtube and watch every Kelsey Hightower video you can find. Kelsey Hightower is perhaps the tech communities best presenter and no one has done more to educate and bring Kubernetes to the mainstream than Kelsey. So a quick shout out and thank you to Kelsey for his contributions to the community. In his honor here are two of my favorite videos from Kelsey. [ one ] [ two ].